The Cambridge Syndrome
Since the second half of the sixties, Cambridge has been known for more than just the excellence of its university. This small city, through which the River Cam meanders, owes at least part of its latter-day renown to a group of young progressive rock musicians who, postdating the Beatles and the Rolling Stones by a few years, ushered in rock’s second revolution, that of psychedelia and avant-gardism. Three of Pink Floyd’s founder-members grew up in Cambridge and underwent their musical initiation there at the beginning of the decade, a time when the musical life of the prestigious university city was astonishingly vibrant. “Cambridge was a great place to grow up,” says David Gilmour. “You’re in a town dominated by education, you’re surrounded by bright people. But then it’s also got this rural heart that spreads practically to the centre. There were great places to meet up with friends.”1 This intellectually stimulating place with its pastoral setting was to leave its mark on the early years of the Floyd.
Roger Barrett, the Soul of the Group
Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett, the soul of the group, was born at 60 Glisson Road, Cambridge, on January 6, 1946. He was the fourth of Winifred (née Flack) and Arthur Max Barrett’s five children. An eminent anatomist and histologist at the university, Dr. Barrett was also an enlightened music lover (a member of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society) and, as a very good classical pianist, an experienced practical musician. It was therefore only natural that he should instill an interest in music in his three sons (Alan, Donald, and Roger) and two daughters (Rosemary and Ruth). At the tender age of seven, Roger and his sister Rosemary won a classical piano competition as a duo. Winifred was an extremely open-minded woman said by some to be related to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first Englishwoman to have gained a degree in medicine and to have been elected a mayor.
In 1950, the Barrett family moved to a larger house at 183 Hills Road. After a few years, Syd entered the prestigious Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where he took little interest in any of his subjects except art (for which he showed quite an aptitude), and displayed even less enthusiasm for the strict discipline that was enforced at the school.
On December 11, 1961, just a few weeks after being diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Arthur Max Barrett died aged fifty-two. Syd was profoundly affected by the loss. Before long, the family’s worsening financial circumstances forced his mother to take in lodgers, radically changing the atmosphere that had reigned in the family home up to then. The teenager took refuge more than ever in his painting and music, and started listening to the US pioneers of rock ’n’ roll, whose records were aired regularly on Radio Luxembourg, but also Lonnie Donegan, who started the fashion for skiffle in the United Kingdom.
After trying his hand at the ukulele and the banjo at the age of eleven, Syd took up the guitar two or three years later. His first instrument was probably an acoustic Hofner Congress, bought for £12, which he strummed in the family sitting room with friends on a Sunday afternoon. In spring 1962, Syd Barrett joined his first group, Geoff Mott and The Mottoes, which was the occasion for him to swap his acoustic guitar for an electric costing £25. According to Roger Waters, this was a Futurama III, imported by Selmer and manufactured in Czechoslovakia. It was the same model that George Harrison was using in Hamburg. In addition to Barrett, this neighborhood band comprised Geoff Mott on lead vocals and guitar, Tony Sainty on bass, and Clive Welham on drums. Their material consisted of the latest hits by the Shadows and rock ’n’ roll numbers recorded a few years earlier by Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly. The rehearsal venue was Barrett’s home. “Roger’s old playroom now had the atmosphere of a coffee bar as the teenagers chatted, smoked, listened to records or proudly showed off their new guitars,” write Mike Watkinson and Pete Anderson.2
David Gilmour, a Child of Grantchester
At this time, Clive Welham was in the habit of turning up at Syd Barrett’s house with one of his best friends, a certain David Gilmour. Born in Trumpington, a village near Cambridge, in 1946, David Jon Gilmour spent part of his childhood in the district of Newnham, specifically at 109 Grantchester Meadows, not far from the celebrated meadow bordering the Cam, which the group was to immortalize in a song a few years later. He was the eldest of Sylvia and Doug Gilmour’s four children, the other three being Peter, Mark, and Catherine. Sylvia was initially a teacher and subsequently a film editor, working on a regular basis for the BBC, while Doug was a senior lecturer in zoology at Cambridge University. Like Syd Barrett, David Gilmour came from a family of intellectuals interested in different forms of artistic expression, in particular, music. “My parents sung well,” he recalls, “my brother played flute, and my sister the violin.”3 He himself chose the guitar, under the influence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley as well as various great names from the blues, from Howlin’ Wolf to the duo Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and the Shadows (featuring Hank Marvin on Stratocaster). And then there were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who had started to shake things up. Years later, Gilmour would remember spending hours with Barrett playing the Stones’ first single, “Come On,” over and over again, music that sealed a firm friendship…
Roger Waters, the Group’s Political Conscience
Another musician with similar musical tastes to Syd and David was George Roger Waters. Born in Great Bookham, Surrey, on September 6, 1943, George Roger, more readily called Roger, was the youngest son of Mary and Eric Fletcher Waters. His father, a physical education teacher, was simultaneously a devout Christian and a member of the Communist Party. A conscientious objector when Great Britain declared war against Nazi Germany, Eric served as an ambulance driver during the Blitz. Abandoning his pacifist ideals, he subsequently enlisted in the British Army, joining Z Company of the Eighth Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. On February 18, 1944, Second Lieutenant Waters fell at Aprilia, on the Italian Front, following the Allied landing at Anzio. As a result, Roger Waters, then aged five months, would never know his father. The resulting trauma was to haunt him for years and would play a key role in many of his future compositions, in particular those on the albums The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983).
The following year, Mary Waters and her sons left Surrey, which was being subjected to heavy V-1 bombardment, to go and live at 42 Rock Road in Cambridge. A teacher by profession, Mary obtained a position at Morley Memorial Primary School on Blinco Grove, where she was to oversee not only her own son’s education, but Syd Barrett’s as well.
A few years later, Roger Waters entered the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where Syd Barrett also studied. Their initial bond was founded on rock ’n’ roll and the Beat literature of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Roger Waters was a politically committed teenager. By the tender age of fifteen, he was already a member of the Cambridge Young Socialists and the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (YCND), a pacifist organization that advocated the unilateral nuclear disarmament of the United Kingdom. It was in one of the YCND’s marches, for which he designed the poster, that he became firm friends with Syd Barrett.
All Roads Lead to London
In 1962, the paths of the three friends diverged as they pursued their different studies. In September, Syd Barrett embarked on an art course at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (to which he had won a scholarship) on Collier Road, where David Gilmour was studying modern languages (including French); Roger Waters left Cambridge to study architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic in London.
Between 1962 and 1964, all three notched up a variety of musical experiences. Leaving Geoff Mott and The Mottoes, Syd Barrett joined Those Without in 1964 (the band’s name was inspired by the title of Françoise Sagan’s 1957 novel Dans un mois, dans un an, translated into English as Those without Shadows), which had risen out of the ashes of the Hollerin’ Blues (whose name had been taken from Charley Patton’s “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues,” recorded in 1929). Syd played both a Hofner 500/5 bass and a 1960 six-string Hofner Committee.
David Gilmour played with various bands, including the Newcomers and the Ramblers, before joining the blues-rock group Jokers Wild in 1964.
As for Roger Waters, in autumn 1963 he became a member of Sigma 6, a group formed by two of his fellow students at the polytechnic, Clive Metcalf and Keith Noble. “I was doing architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic,” recalls Roger. “I suppose we formed several groups there. It wasn’t serious, we didn’t play anywhere. […] We just sat around talking about how we would spend the money we would make. […] In college there’s always a room where people seem to gravitate to with their instruments and bits of things […]”4 Clive Metcalf was on bass, Keith Noble on vocals, Roger Waters on lead guitar, Rick Wright on rhythm guitar and keyboards, Nick Mason on drums, and, occasionally, Keith’s sister Sheilagh Noble and Juliette Gale, Rick’s future wife, also on vocals. At the beginning of 1964, the group was renamed the Abdabs (without Sheilagh Noble). Their repertoire consisted of US standards such as “Summertime,” blues such as “Crawling King Snake,” and numbers written by Ken Chapman, a friend of Metcalf’s who would become the group’s manager. It was here that Roger Waters made the acquaintance of Rick Wright and Nick Mason.
Rick Wright and Nick Mason
Richard William Wright was born on July 28, 1943, in Pinner, Middlesex, to Daisy and Cedric Wright. His father was a biochemist at Unigate Dairies (then Uniq plc) and the family lived in Hatch End, a well-heeled suburb in northwest London. Rick was the beneficiary of a middle-class education, attending a very select private school. He initially learned piano and trumpet and, later, while convalescing from a broken leg, taught himself the guitar by listening to the American pioneers of the blues. He then developed this musical knowledge further at the Eric Gilder School of Music in London, where he studied composition and theory. It was at this time that he discovered the jazz of Miles Davis (the LPs Kind of Blue and Porgy and Bess in particular), John Coltrane, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, and others. Yet in 1962, he enrolled in the architecture program at Regent Street Polytechnic. Nick Mason would remember him as “… someone quiet, introverted…”5
Nicholas Berkeley Mason hails from Edgbaston, a suburb of Birmingham, where he came into the world on January 27, 1944. In addition to their son, his parents Sally and Bill (properly Rowland Hill Berkeley Mason) also had three daughters: Sarah, Melanie, and Serena. Immediately after the war, Nick’s father, a documentary filmmaker, was given the opportunity to join the Shell Film Unit. The entire Mason family moved to London, where they lived in the affluent district of Hampstead. The young Nick was put through a number of educational establishments and, inevitably, came to see the rock ’n’ roll revolution as a potent message of emancipation. At twelve years of age, he would spend whole nights listening to the show Rockin’ to Dreamland on Radio Luxembourg and bought himself Elvis Presley’s early 78s. Smitten with rock ’n’ roll, he dreamed of starting a band with his pals, even though none of them could really play an instrument! It was more or less by default that Nick turned to percussion, and partly too because he was given a pair of brushes as a present: “After the failure of my early piano and violin lessons, this seemed a perfectly legitimate reason to become a drummer.”5 The story then moves to Frensham Heights, a private school in Surrey (where he would meet his future first wife, Lindy), and subsequently, in 1962, the polytechnic, where he got to know Rick Wright and Roger Waters. “One afternoon, as I tried to shut out the murmur of forty fellow architectural students so that I could concentrate on the technical drawing in front of me, Roger’s long, distinctive shadow fell across my drawing board,” he recalls in his autobiography. “Although he had studiously ignored my existence up until that moment, Roger had finally recognized in me a kindred musical spirit trapped within a budding architect’s body. The star-crossed paths of Virgo and Aquarius had dictated our destiny, and were compelling Roger to seek a way to unite our minds in a great creative adventure,” writes the Pink Floyd drummer tongue-in-cheek, before shattering the illusion: “No, no, no. […] The only reason Roger had approached me was that he wanted to borrow my car.”5
Leonard’s Lodgers
Waters, Mason, and Wright (the latter in the meantime having quit the Regent Street Polytechnic for the London College of Music) decided to pursue their musical adventure together, leaving Metcalf and Noble to go their own way. Thirty-nine Stanhope Gardens, in the London district of Highgate, was a vast Edwardian house that had just been bought by Mike Leonard, a devotee of light shows who was a lecturer at Regent Street Polytechnic and Hornsey College of Art. This became not only their home but also their new rehearsal space. “Stanhope Gardens made a real difference to our musical activities,” writes Nick Mason. “We had our own permanent rehearsal facility, thanks to an indulgent landlord: indeed, we used the name Leonard’s Lodgers for a while. Rehearsals took place in the front room of the flat where all the equipment was permanently set up. Unfortunately, this made any study very difficult and sleep almost out of question since it was also Roger’s and my bedroom.”5
In September 1964, a new musician joined Leonard’s Lodgers. A former pupil at Cambridgeshire High School, Rado “Bob” Klose was a long-standing acquaintance of David Gilmour and Syd Barrett. And it was with Syd that he came to London, taking up a place at the Regent Street Polytechnic (two years below the Waters-Wright-Mason trio) while Barrett pursued his study of painting at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. Klose moved into the first floor of Stanhope Gardens, occupying the room vacated by Mason, who had moved back in with his parents for financial reasons. Klose was an experienced guitarist who listened to a lot of blues and jazz (especially Mickey Baker). He suggested to Waters, Wright, and Mason that they bring in Chris Dennis as singer. Then working as a dentist at the Northolt RAF base, Dennis happened to own, recalls Nick Mason, a “Vox PA system consisting of two columns and a separate amplifier with individual channels for the microphones.”5 Tea Set, the lineup with Dennis, lasted for just two short months, until the arrival of Syd Barrett.
“Syd” and the Birth of the Pink Floyd Sound
Roger Waters thought about bringing Syd into the band as soon as he heard that his childhood friend had come to college in London. “It was great when Syd joined,” recalls Rick Wright. “Before him we’d play the R&B classics, because that’s what all groups were supposed to be doing then. But I never liked R&B very much. I was actually more of a jazz fan. With Syd, the direction changed, it became more improvised around the guitar and keyboards. Roger started to play the bass as a lead instrument and I started to introduce more of my classical feel.”3 However, it seems that before joining the future Pink Floyd, Syd had doubts about how he would fit in. Bob Klose recalls his first appearance, in the middle of the rehearsal session (in the attic at Stanhope Gardens) that would seal Chris’s fate: “Syd, arriving late, watched quietly from the top of the stairs. Afterwards he said, ‘Yeah, it sounded great, but I don’t see what I would do in the band.’”5
Two months after Syd Barrett joined, in December 1964 (or early 1965 according to some sources), the group recorded a demo of their first few songs in a small, Decca-owned studio in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead. This comprised a cover of “I’m a King Bee” by Slim Harpo, three compositions by Barrett (“Butterfly,” “Lucy Leave,” and “Remember Me”), a collective number entitled, “Double O Bo,” and Roger Waters’s very first composition: “Walk With Me Sydney.” Their first auditions were not long in coming—for a new club called Beat City, for the famous ITV television show Ready Steady Go! and for the Countdown Club (three ninety-minute sets per evening). Bob Klose left the group in summer 1965 to concentrate on his studies, while Syd Barrett and David Gilmour set off for the South of France. It was soon after this that Tea Set was renamed the Pink Floyd Sound (as a tribute to two American South bluesmen) and the group was offered new gigs in various clubs and universities.
The “Happenings” at the Marquee Club
While their various engagements at the London clubs enabled the Pink Floyd Sound to make a name for themselves, it was without doubt their participation in the third Giant Mystery Happening at the Marquee Club that was to seal the band’s future. These happenings (also known as the Spontaneous Underground), aimed at celebrating an alternative culture in full creative ferment, were the brainchild of American Steve Stollman, who had come to London to search for new talent with which to supplement his brother Bernard’s label ESP-Disk.
On January 30, 1966, Stollman booked the Marquee Club (the Mecca of the English rock scene) for the first of the Giant Mystery Happening events, at which Donovan, Graham Bond, and Mose Allison appeared. He repeated the experiment on February 27 and again on March 13, and on every Sunday afternoon thereafter. It was as the Pink Floyd Sound that Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason rose to the challenge and participated in the third event, billed on the flyers as the “Trip.” Steve Stollman: “I hadn’t a clue who they were, but someone suggested them.”6 Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, an avant-garde filmmaker responsible for the 1966 documentary Syd Barrett’s First Trip, recalls that Steve Stollman was looking for unconventional sounds for these Sunday sessions: “‘I knew Steve Stollman. He was looking for experimental music, and nobody else wanted to play those Sunday afternoon sessions. That’s how they got the Floyd.’”6 Pink Floyd’s lengthy, blues-derived psychedelic improvisations caused quite a sensation among the hip young Londoners lucky enough to find themselves at the appropriately named “Trip.” Hoppy (real name John Hopkins), a leading photographer of Swinging London and a key figure in the British counterculture, remembers the first time he encountered the group: “It was like walking into a wall of sound, not unmusical, but certainly something like I’d never heard before.”7 Barrett, Waters, Wright, and Mason took part in Stollman’s Marquee events again from March 27 to June 12, and then from September 30 to the end of 1966. (The exact dates of their appearances at the Spontaneous Underground are not known.)
It was at the Spontaneous Underground of June 12, 1966, that Peter Jenner first heard the hallucinogenic music forged by Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason. “The Floyd were mostly doing blues songs, but instead of having howling guitar solos with the guitarist leaning back, like all guitarists did back then, they were doing cosmic shit. They weren’t doing interesting blues songs. But it was what they did with them that was interesting. I think what Syd was doing was a way of being distinctive and filling in the gaps where you should have had a howling Clapton or Peter Green guitar solo. I was very intrigued.”1
Jenner and King, Two Friends in Search of the New
The son of a vicar, Peter Jenner (born in 1943) studied economics at Cambridge and at twenty-one years of age was appointed a lecturer at the London School of Economics. Less interested in the theories of Malthus and Marx than in avant-garde music, it was not long before he quit that venerable institution and began to frequent some of Swinging London’s trendier spots. He became a member of the Notting Hill community and a friend of the ubiquitous Hoppy (John Hopkins). In 1964, he helped to establish the Notting Hill Carnival, a celebration of Caribbean culture, and in 1966 he contributed to the founding of the London Free School. He was also a collaborator on the London-based underground newspaper the International Times (it). In spring of the same year, Peter Jenner set up an independent record company, DNA Productions, with Hoppy, Ron Atkins, and Alan Beckett, and fitted out a small studio in a former dairy at 46a Old Church Street, Chelsea. Joe Boyd was in charge of production and John Wood of recording at Sound Techniques, where the free-improvising ensemble AMM and subsequently the avant-garde jazzman Steve Lacy recorded. While the music of AMM was interesting and unusual in that it no longer owed anything to the harmonic and rhythmic structures of the blues, it was also, like the free jazz of Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor, the preserve of a small number of neophytes. Hoppy being preoccupied with other projects, Peter Jenner partnered his longtime friend Andrew King in this new venture. Born in 1942, Andrew was also a vicar’s son. A cybernetics expert, he quit his job at British Airways after becoming bored there. The two friends were on the lookout for avant-garde sounds.
September Meeting
Instinctively, Jenner set his sights on Pink Floyd, although at first he could not work out where their strange sonority came from: “[…] it turned out to be Syd and Rick,” he recalls. “Syd had his Binson Echorec and was doing weird things with feedback. Rick was also producing some strange, long, shifting chords. Nick was using mallets. That was the thing that got me. This was avant-garde! Sold!”5 Pink Floyd was innovative while at the same time preserving the original spirit of rock ’n’ roll. Their experimentation and Syd Barrett’s intriguing and seductive dandy image struck Jenner and King as providing all the necessary ingredients for success.
On that June 12, 1966, as soon as the Floyd had finished their set, Jenner rushed over to them and exclaimed: “‘You lads could be bigger than the Beatles!’ and we sort of looked at him and replied in a dubious tone ‘Yes, well we’ll see you when we get back from our hols,’ because we were all shooting off for some sun on the Continent.”3 Undaunted, Jenner got hold of their address from Steve Stollman and turned up at their Stanhope Gardens lair. “Roger [Waters] answered the door. Everybody else had gone off on holiday, as it was the end of the academic year […] Roger hadn’t told me to fuck off. It was just ‘See you in September.’”5
And so, in September 1966, Peter Jenner and Andrew King became their official managers. “Peter focused on us. Of the two, Peter was the hustler—and the diplomat—who could talk his way into a deal. Peter describes himself as ‘an A1 bullshitter—still am!’ and had the added bonus of a link into the underground scene. Andrew was more relaxed, and a lot of fun to be around, but his taste for a good time sometimes led to moments of unreliability.”5 The first two things Jenner and King did were to create Blackhill Enterprises (named after King’s cottage in Wales) and to use a small legacy that King had received to buy new equipment and a lot of spots for the light show.
Blackhill and the Free Concerts
On October 31, Barrett, Waters, Wright, and Mason became partners with Jenner and King in Blackhill Enterprises, whose offices were located at 32 Alexander Street, Bayswater. In keeping with the hippie philosophy of the day, any profits accumulated by the group—along with any from ventures with the other artists already signed or about to be signed by the production company—were to be distributed six ways. Those other artists would include Marc Bolan (the future leader of T. Rex, who married June Child, the Blackhill Enterprises secretary), Roy Harper, the Edgar Broughton Band, the Third Ear Band, and Kevin Ayers. “They were very nice, an honourable exception to the shady rule about managers, and really cared for the people they worked for,” notes Robert Wyatt, then the drummer and singer with Soft Machine.
Peter Jenner and Andrew King had the peculiarity of getting their artists to play in venues hitherto reserved for classical music, such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Mayfair and the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, where Pink Floyd played on January 16 and 17, 1967, respectively. Little motivated by the lure of financial gain, Blackhill Enterprises would also initiate the free concerts in Hyde Park (having overcome the reservations of Parliament). Several of these jamborees would become engraved on the collective memory: that of June 29, 1968, featuring Pink Floyd, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Roy Harper, and Jethro Tull; and the Rolling Stones’ concert of July 5, 1969 (in which Family, the Battered Ornaments, King Crimson, Roy Harper, the Third Ear Band, Alexis Korner’s New Church, and Screw also appeared), dedicated to Brian Jones, who had died two days earlier.
The collaboration of Jenner, King, and Pink Floyd lasted until Barrett’s departure. The arrival of David Gilmour marked the beginning of a new chapter for Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason, while the two producers would continue to manage Syd Barrett.
The UFO Adventure
Jenner and King, who had an extensive network of friends and acquaintances, introduced Pink Floyd to the nascent London underground movement, opening wide the doors of the London Free School and indeed those of all the iconic venues of Swinging London to them. The group played All Saints Church Hall, which became famous for its light shows; the Roundhouse, appearing alongside Soft Machine at the October 15 launch party for it, the counterculture magazine founded by Hoppy, David Mairowitz, Pete Stansill, Barry Miles, Jim Haynes, and Tom McGrath; and finally the famous UFO Club, where they performed for the first time on December 23, 1966. This major center of alternative culture, founded by the irrepressible Hoppy and Joe Boyd, a twenty-four-year-old American responsible for recruiting and recording new talent for the Elektra label, would propel the group to the forefront of the alternative scene. As a result, the Floyd, somewhat despite themselves, became the emblematic group not only of the club, but of the entire London underground. Nick Mason would later write: “We may have been adopted as the house orchestra, but we rarely got to share the psychedelic experience. We were out of it, not on acid, but out of the loop […]. […] We were busy being a band: rehearsing, travelling to gigs, packing up and driving home. Psychedelia was around us but not within us. […] Of the band, Syd was perhaps intrigued by the wider aspects of psychedelia, and drawn to some of the philosophical and mystical aspects […].”5
By the end of 1966, the Pink Floyd Sound had already distanced themselves from the popular music of the US and made a mark for themselves as one of the major groups on London’s new music scene. Andrew King would later reveal: “We didn’t realise it, but the tide was coming up the beach, and the Pink Floyd were right on top of the wave.”5
Joe Boyd and the Group’s Recording Debut
On January 11 and 12, 1967, Pink Floyd recorded “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Nick’s Boogie” for the soundtrack of Peter Whitehead’s documentary Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, followed two weeks later by “Arnold Layne” and “Candy and a Currant Bun.” These recordings were made with Joe Boyd at Sound Techniques studios. Naturally, the American producer considered signing Pink Floyd to Elektra, but Jac Holzman, his former boss, who had only heard the group rehearsing onstage, was not particularly keen. Polydor, on the other hand, the label to which at that time the Who and Cream were signed, showed a real interest and offered a £1,500 advance. Too late… Bryan Morrison, originally engaged to line up gigs for the group, had entered into what proved to be fruitful negotiations with EMI. And so on February 28, 1967 (the date varies from source to source with other possibilities being February 1, as claimed by Nick Mason, although this seems improbable, and February 27), Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason, supported by Peter Jenner and Andrew King, signed a contract with the record company that had signed the Beatles, obtaining a £5,000 advance in the bargain. In Andrew King’s words: “… a shit deal, but a thousand times better than the Beatles.”5 On the other hand, and here’s the rub, a clause in the contract stipulated that they had to part ways with Joe Boyd, the producer of their first single and, more importantly, the founder of the UFO Club who had helped the group to take off. Barry Miles: “Even though he was being asked to sabotage his own deal with Polydor, Boyd agreed to do it because he thought that if ‘Arnold Layne’ was a hit, they would be foolish to use anyone else to produce the album.”3 In the end, this is precisely what they did.
BOB DIE LION!
Among the earliest influences on Syd Barrett were the Beatles, Booker T. and the MG’s, Miles Davis, and an American folk singer by the name of Bob Die Lion, whose debut album Barrett looked for in vain in the record stores of Cambridge. And there was a good reason why he couldn’t find it, because this folk singer was clearly Bob Dylan!
HE WAS NAMED ROGER BUT KNOWN AS SYD!
The origin of the nickname “Syd” is the subject of debate. According to Nick Mason, “Syd was not always Syd—he’d been christened Roger Keith, but at the Riverside Jazz Club he frequented in a local Cambridge pub, one of the stalwarts was a drummer called Sid Barrett. The club regulars immediately nicknamed this newly arrived Barrett ‘Syd,’ but with a ‘y’ to avoid total confusion, and that’s how we always knew him.”5 Others maintain that Roger had simply found the first name of this drummer (or double bassist according to some) to his liking. Yet another version suggests that he had been renamed well before this time, during a boy scouting event at which he had opted to wear a cap rather than the traditional beret. Nevertheless, he never really took to it, especially in the presence of his family.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
In 1965, Jokers Wild recorded five songs for an album from which the single “Don’t Ask Me [What I Say]” would be taken. Among the musicians who would play with the group between 1964 and 1966 were Rick Wills and Willie Wilson, who later contributed to David Gilmour’s eponymous first album in 1978.
Roger Waters never went anywhere without his guitar, and Nick Mason recalls the motto inspired by a Ray Charles song that was inscribed on his instrument case: “I Believe to My Soul.“
PINK AND FLOYD
Before cutting loose from the influence of the blues, Pink Floyd made a name for themselves subjecting blues standards to psychedelic treatment. Indeed the group owes its name to two exponents of the Piedmont blues: Pink Anderson (1900–1974) and Floyd Council (1911–1976), from South and North Carolina respectively—two pioneers of the blues whom Syd Barrett came across while reading a text by the ethnomusicologist Paul Oliver on the back of a Blind Boy Fuller album. And two names that sounded good together!
IN YOUR HEADPHONES
Jenner’s voice can be heard at the beginning of “Astronomy Dominé,” the opening song on the group’s first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.